The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken

THE FISH SUPPER

I.

Faulkner looked out of the office window. It had stopped raining, and evidently was going to clear off, after all. A watery light was breaking through the rapid clouds, which were themselves of a softer texture, and the church spire in Wellington, three miles away, suddenly caught a pale beam of sunlight and glistened evanescently. Best and surest sign of all, old Sandy was out on the lawn with his motor lawn-mower. Faulkner watched him stoop over the machine, heard it begin to sputter, and then the old man climbed into the seat and began his slow onslaught on the dandelions.…

“It looks,” said Ulrich, behind him, “as if we’d have our party, after all. And, believe me, I’d like a bottle of nice cold beer after a day like this.”

Faulkner continued to look out of the window, feeling the stubble on his chin. Now that his wife had left him, he was no longer so careful about shaving every day. Her letter lay unanswered on his desk.

“Yes, I guess so,” he said.

He could feel Ulrich waiting, deprecatingly as always, for some further assurance of interest; he even felt sure that Ulrich was holding some sort of document in his hand, turning it nervously; but he was damned if he’d make any further effort to be agreeable. He waited, watching Sandy’s slow progress—it was as if he were sweeping the lawn of dandelions with a huge carpet-sweeper. When he got to the wire fence at the end of the company’s grounds he turned the machine and began coming back. A pair of robins had already arrived to search the freshly cut grass for food.

“Well,” said Ulrich, shifting his feet, “I’ll drop in for you at five, if that’s all right.”

“Sure. Do that.”

The apologetic footsteps moved away, the door closed, and—thank God—he was alone again. The clouds seemed to be in a great hurry—it was almost as if they really had somewhere to go. Somewhere to go. It would be nice to have somewhere to go. Something better, anyway, than this accursed factory, stuck down here in the country, miles from anywhere. He couldn’t exactly blame Barbara for not wanting to live here. But then, where you got work you had to take it. If she had been everything that a wife ought to be—! But what, exactly, ought a wife to be?

He sat down at his desk, picked up the letter, opened it, and began, for the twentieth time in three days, to read it again. The phrases, in Barbara’s babyish handwriting, had now become almost meaningless. “I am, of course, awfully sorry” (why did the word “awfully” always annoy him?) “that it all had to end like this”—“terribly disappointed in you”—“but of course you have always considered your own interests rather than mine”—“no sort of life there for the children”—“so I think it will be better for all concerned”—and so on, to the end, with its casual “Goodbye, Luke, and I really hope you’ll be happy.” Good God, what did she expect of a husband? He had been unhappy ever since that time when she fell in love with Paul, but he had, for the sake of the family, tried his best to conceal it. When his income had finally proved insufficient he had found this job here in the country, reorganizing a dilapidated factory; had given up his life in New York, which meant so much to him; had endeavored to endure a life of solitude, hoping that sooner or later she would come to join him; and, now, this was his reward. Of course, he had never been much of a success; in fact, to make lots of money had never been one of his ambitions. Why couldn’t they have been happy as they were? Why was it so necessary that the children should be sent to boarding schools and dancing schools, and live on Riverside Drive or in a swell suburb—why was it so necessary that they should meet only the “best” people, and all that kind of folderol? That sort of thing didn’t mean happiness. If the children couldn’t have the same advantages they had had—schools and colleges and such—that was unfortunate, but it wasn’t fatal, was it?… But now the axe had fallen.

He tried once more to find a suitable tone for his reply. He put his elbows on the desk and began rubbing his forehead with a sort of painful violence which was somehow a great relief to him. He was tempted to be bitter, to be unbridled, but a kind of sporting instinct forbade that; there was so much else that he wanted to say; in fact, he wanted, in a sense, to write her a loveletter, a loveletter which also would tell her in horribly brutal sentences what he really thought of her. But the whole thing was too complicated. How could you sum up in one letter all your feelings about ten years of married life? All the tendernesses, the secret symbols, the extraordinary elaborate and profound and—yes—vascular dual consciousness which their conjoined experience had given them? All the regrets, the anguishes, the ecstasies, the memories, the precious emblems of shared pleasure—no, it was impossible. It would all have to be left out. There was no kind of shorthand which could express it. It was as if the moss, torn from the wall, should try to tell you, with the raw surface, what the wall had been like.…

He could say that, of course; and the idea pleasing him, he took up his pen and drew a sheet of typewriter paper toward him and wrote on it “My darling.” But the impulse ran out, died—or, more precisely, withered in the presence of his anger. It was no good. He would have to take refuge in a merely formal letter, a glazed official style, something inhuman and abstract. Polite, uncircumstantial, with perhaps just a suggestion of bitterness and more than a suggestion of affection, affection curbed. And just the same, it was ridiculous that at such a crisis of one’s life one couldn’t, simply couldn’t, say what one really meant, and say it richly. If only Barbara had understood all this! If only she had seen—underneath his helplessness and his indifference to the conventional—his desperate loyalty and essential gentleness!… How absurd. This was tantamount to asking destiny, implacable destiny, to be one’s mother; it was like trying to pillow one’s head on a meteor.

He was still struggling with the problem, still remembering this and that and the other—their visit to Jackson Falls, the time when Betty had fallen into the river, the winter when Paul had taken to calling on Barbara every afternoon, Paul’s habit of kissing her hand, her curious indifference to cleanliness in the house, the odd trace of exhibitionism which always showed in her in Paul’s presence—when the door opened and Ulrich came in. He remembered, then, with a start, that the whistle had already blown; he had half noticed it at the time. He jumped up, crumpling the sheet of paper.

“Five o’clock, eh?” he said.

“My wife’s waiting in the car,” said Ulrich, tapping the edge of the desk with a rolled-up newspaper. He always carried a rolled-up newspaper. “And she says Miss Houston will meet us over there in Wellington.”

II.

It was to be a fish supper, in a little secret restaurant which Ulrich had discovered: a place where they gave you very good fish, and also very good beer, smuggled across the lake from Canada. Ulrich prided himself on possessing little secrets of this sort. It was as if he felt some queer kind of inferiority, and sought to make up for it by knowing all sorts of out-of-the-way odds and ends. He always knew, for example, just which of the standard brands of cigarette contained, at the moment, the purest and best tobacco, and which of them were capitalizing their success by recourse to cheaper materials. He knew a buyer of tweeds in Buffalo, and could get his suits for a third of what it cost anyone else. And it went without saying that if there was a new place at which you could get something to drink he would know about it. Faulkner really disliked the man; he felt sure that Ulrich wanted to get something out of him. Was it merely a sort of social thing? a desire to be on friendly, not to say intimate, terms with the manager, whom he perhaps also suspected of being “superior”? His manner was always uneasily ingratiating; he smiled too much.

And his wife bore out this impression, as Faulkner immediately discovered when they joined her in the car. All the way to Wellington, while Ulrich drove, Mrs. Ulrich, a plump fair-haired little woman, who shut up her blue eyes when she laughed, did her best to captivate him and impress him. She was playing the “great lady,” evidently under the impression that Faulkner moved in some social sphere of impossible grandeur—the world of marble halls and terraces with urns, which, in America, at any rate, exists only in the movies. She had cultivated a broad “a,” and used it with devastating effect; except when, now and then, she used it where she shouldn’t.

Faulkner was patient with her, replied to her lofty inanities, gave her a cigarette, and prayed that this Miss Houston (whoever she was) would be more interesting, more honest, and less on the make.

“Who is this Miss Houston?” he asked.

Mrs. Ulrich arched her eyebrows, and then immediately afterwards, for no discoverable reason, narrowed her eyes at him enigmatically.

“Ah,” she said, “she’s a woman of mystery.”

Faulkner felt that he was expected to smile in reply to this challenge, and obediently did so, but without much conviction; at the same time, suddenly, feeling extraordinarily angry with this fool of a female. He saw the whole thing—all the months of scheming that had gone to this party, in order that she might let it be known in local society that she was an intimate friend of the manager, Mr. Luke Faulkner. Revolting. All the more revolting, and also pathetic, not to say tragic, when one knew—as he did—how silly and unfounded was this legend of his social splendor.

The conversation lagged. Mrs. Ulrich could think of nothing further to say, at the moment, and sat back, ladylike, holding her cigarette between two stiff fingers; and Faulkner watched the flight of wet trees past the car, and the fence-rails from which raindrops still hung, bright with the evening light. A sense of unreality came over him; he realized how little he knew these two people, and how little he liked them; he hated the back of Ulrich’s head, and the little dark point of hair which hung over his collar; he disliked the silver vase beside the window, with its artificial bachelor’s-buttons; he loathed Ulrich’s habit of humming popular airs. And to be riding in a closed car, an expensive car, a car more expensive than he himself had ever had or wanted to have—to be riding in this, with two such commonplace people, and at a time when he particularly wanted to be alone … the thing was so incredible as to seem ludicrous. It was, in fact, so fantastic that the thought crossed his mind that the adventure might be amusing. Why not simply throw oneself into it, sink to this queer level, bathe in this strangeness? Might it not be in a way refreshing, invigorating? Suppose, for example, he were to make love to this pudgy and overscented female absurdity who sat beside him, bumping against him when the car bumped; what would happen? It might, at any rate, end this little campaign for social conquest.

III.

The “secret” restaurant turned out to be a kind of little yacht club, or boathouse, mounted on stilts over the lake. It looked like the sort of place that would sell you bait and rent you a dirty fishy-smelling boat. The dining room, however, was rather charming: a long, low-ceilinged room, windowed on three sides, with an uneven floor. They found a table at the far end, overlooking the lake, and sat down; and Faulkner remarked to Miss Houston that it was very like being on a ship. He could feel the whole thing moving.

“Wait till you’ve had two or three of their dry Martinis,” said Ulrich, “and you’ll think it’s moving, all right!”

Miss Houston was a disapointment, as far as mystery was concerned; she was a nice enough girl of twenty-four or -five, dark, with level gray eyes, somewhat awkward and mannerless. Faulkner gathered that she had only recently been “taken up” by Mrs. Ulrich, and that they didn’t know each other particularly well. It came out that she was a teacher of singing in Albany. It was evident that Mrs. Ulrich had romanticized her. Still, she was a pleasant enough creature, and knew Bach from Beethoven; and within a few minutes of the introduction she and Faulkner had formed a sort of alliance against the Ulrichs. Faulkner felt that if they should want to they could make the Ulrichs very uncomfortable.

“You studied music in Paris?” he said.

“No, in London. I was there for two years.”

“Lucky woman! I had two months there, in a college vacation once, and I think it was the most exciting two months of my life. I had a room in Gray’s Inn.”

“In Gray’s Inn! How simply delicious!… I lived in Lamb’s Conduit Street—don’t you love the names they give their streets?—and I often used to walk through the Inn.”

Mrs. Ulrich, smiling a little constrainedly, turned to see if the cocktails were coming. The waiter was just arriving, with a double round, as ordered. Faulkner felt that she was glad of the interruption.

“Well, here’s looking at us,” said Ulrich.

The cocktails were as good as Ulrich had said; they drank two apiece, and then ordered a third, and after that came the beer and the fish. A phonograph squealed “The Cat’s Whiskers” at the far end of the room, and two girls went down the gangway to a canoe by the float, fussed over some cushions, and paddled off on the lake. The water was like glass—pale pink with the reflected light of a waning sunset. One of the girls trailed her bare arm in the water.

Mrs. Ulrich was flushed and excited, and determined to make conversation with Faulkner; she was aggressive about it, challenging, and Faulkner began to be annoyed.

“My husband says you come from New York,” she said. “Don’t you find it dull here in the country after living in New York?”

“Oh, it might be worse,” said Faulkner.

“I’m sure you don’t really mean that.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

Mrs. Ulrich straightened her mouth to a thin line.

“How can you?… After all the luxuries and excitements you’ve been used to in New York! Goodness—there are times when I think I shall go mad.”

“Oh. You come from New York too?”

“Well, no, but I’ve been there a good deal; and I’m very fond of it. I’ve always tried to make a point of going down at least twice a year. I have a great many friends there, you see.”

Mrs. Ulrich seemed a little confused as she said this, and looked uneasily at her husband and then quickly away again. Something in her behavior suggested to Faulkner that she was lying. But why should she take the trouble to lie about so trifling a thing?

“You probably know the city a good deal better than I do, then,” he said. “It’s always the occasional visitor who takes the cream off it, you know.”

“Some people have all the luck,” sighed Miss Houston. “I’ve been to New York just twice in my life—when I sailed to Europe and when I came back.”

“Don’t you think Fifth Avenue is simply wonderful?…” Mrs. Ulrich disregarded Miss Houston’s interpolation, and addressed herself again to Faulkner. “And Broadway at night, with all those wonderful lights, and the crowds, and always the chance that you’ll see a gang murder, or a girl being enticed by the White Slavers! It’s so romantic, don’t you think? I never can get enough of it.”

Ulrich looked at his wife, cleared his throat somewhat loudly, and then dropped his eyes. He seemed embarrassed.

“And the shops! My goodness! I always want to buy everything. And the theaters!… Well, the truth is I really regard myself as a New Yorker, nowadays, I’ve been there so much, and know it all so well.”

Faulkner was polite.

“Where do you usually stay?” he said.

“Oh, I’ve tried a good many of the hotels”—her tone was a little vague—“but I guess I’ve been more to the Belmont than to any of the others. Or is it the Biltmore? I never can keep those names straight, they’re so much alike, you know. I guess it’s the Belmont. Yes, it’s the Belmont.”

“Let’s see; the Belmont.” Faulkner frowned a little, reflecting. “I’m afraid I don’t just remember where that is. It’s pretty far downtown, isn’t it? Near the Square?”

“Well, it’s not easy to describe, but I think so, yes. Quite near the Square. But of course it’s very centrally situated, and very comfortable. Expensive, you know—but very good.”

“Washington Square?”

“Yes, Washington Square. That was it, of course.”

Miss Houston looked perplexed.

“Oh, but I thought—” she began to say.

Mrs. Ulrich interrupted her rapidly. She dropped her hand on Miss Houston’s and gave it an affectionate squeeze.

“My dear, you really ought to cultivate the habit of going down there for your shopping! There’s nothing else like it. I don’t believe London is in it with New York.… Do you think so, Mr. Faulkner? The buildings are so wonderful!”

Miss Houston glanced anxiously at Faulkner.

“Architecturally,” he said, “some of them are very fine. I’ve always particularly liked Gimbels’, with that tower of pink stone and the golden turret—especially at night. And its position is so commanding, too, there by Central Park. Don’t you think so?”

“Beautiful,” sighed Mrs. Ulrich. “Simply beautiful.”

“Though just why they should have put the Museum right bang beside it, so overshadowed by it, I can’t imagine. Don’t you think it was a mistake?”

Mrs. Ulrich nodded rapidly.

“Great mistake,” she said. “Not that I was ever one to care much about museums!… Me for the bright lights, and Coney Island! I’m afraid I’m rather a flibbertygibbet. Ralph always says so, don’t you, Ralph?”

Ulrich smiled obediently.

“Did you ever take the tunnel over to Staten Island?” asked Faulkner.

“Let me see …” Mrs. Ulrich deliberated, tilting her head to one side. “Yes, I think I did—in fact, several times.” She nodded rapidly again, remembering. “Oh, yes. In fact, I think I can say that I know my way about the city as well as anybody.”

“What about another round of cocktails?” suggested Ulrich. “Any bidders? We might as well get tight.”

There was a pause in the conversation while the cocktails were brought; and Faulkner began to feel a little drunk, just drunk enough to be reckless. He stretched out his legs under the table, and smiled.

“You know,” he said, looking genially at Mrs. Ulrich, “I suspect you’ve never been to New York in your life.”

Mrs. Ulrich turned scarlet.

“Why, what do you mean!… I guess you’re kidding me!” She gave a little laugh. “Haven’t I been telling you all this time that I’m a regular New Yorker?”

There was a silence. Faulkner half turned toward the lake and looked through the screen at the darkening water. He saw a canoe a little way off with a rosy Japanese lantern in it.

“Your details are singularly inaccurate,” he said.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Faulkner, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.… Ralph, don’t you think it’s time we were starting back?…”

Ulrich looked at his watch.

“What’s the rush?” he said.

“That Staten Island tunnel”—said Faulkner—“doesn’t exist, for example.”

Mrs. Ulrich glared at him, flushing again; she tried to look him firmly in the eyes.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” she said. “And aren’t you rather rude?”

“And Gimbels’ is not pink, and has no golden turret, and isn’t in Central Park,!” he went on, implacably, feeling as if he had a knife in his hand. “Nor is the Hotel Belmont in Washington Square; it’s by the Grand Central Station, on 42d Street.”

Mrs. Ulrich jumped to her feet.

“Give me my cape,” she said.

She refrained from looking at Faulkner; she turned her back, and began to walk out of the room, while Ulrich paid the bill. Miss Houston blew her nose. There was a distressing moment when nobody could think of anything to say. Then they all got up and moved toward the door.

Mrs. Ulrich had already got into the car; she was crying, and when her husband and the two others came up she turned her face away. Ulrich and Miss Houston got into the car, but Faulkner stood by the door with his hat in his hand.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Ulrich,” he said. “I’ve been worried and out of sorts, and the temptation was too much for me.… Forgive me, and don’t do it again.… If you don’t mind, Ulrich, I’ll stay behind and get myself another drink. Too nice an evening to be going home yet awhile.… Good night, Miss Houston.”

Ulrich smiled guiltily, made a feeble and meaningless gesture with one hand from the wheel of the car, and Faulkner walked back toward the restaurant. As he opened the door he heard the car moving off.

He went back to the same table, sat down, and ordered another cocktail. It was now perfectly dark. The canoe with the lantern had glided away to a distance, faint voices came over the lake, a night-hawk was mewing somewhere in the upper darkness. He put his elbows on the table and began again rubbing his forehead with cruelly violent hands. Everything was meaningless, mad, ridiculous. Those two poor fools—that nice harmless girl—the cocktails, the canoes, the evening—and his wife’s unanswered letter. What on earth could he say to her? He took between thumb and forefinger the stem of the cocktail glass which the waiter had brought him, and revolved it to and fro. He began to imagine the letter. “My darling—this world is insane, ridiculous, mad, full of fools. When I revolve this cocktail glass the glass moves but the liquid remains still; and the olive stirs only faintly, like some weed at the bottom of the sea when a current wafts it. Someone is singing on the lake. I can hear the plop of a paddle. I am an old idiot, a failure, a blundering creature who means well. I love you much more than I thought I did. I shall have to hire a car to get back to the factory from here. I was cruel to Mrs. Ulrich—because I want to be cruel to you, and to myself. But I am no worse than anyone else—I am a harmless fellow, likable, amiable, and I want to have my life. Why did you fall in love with Paul? Why did you stand there by the door in your bathing suit, letting the raincoat momentarily slip from your shoulders in order that he might see you? I knew that you were thrilling to his presence, conscious of him with your whole being, and I was deeply hurt; I felt as if the world had fallen away from beneath my feet. And now I am lost.”

Laboriously, he took out a cigarette and lighted it. The match fell to the floor still blazing, and he trod out the flame with an uncertain foot, taking a cruel pleasure in an unnecessary repetition of the treading. He had at the same time an impulse to laugh; but the laugh remained—as he himself phrased it, in continuation of the letter—a “cerebral giggle, which twice contracts the diaphragm.”